Fairphone vs Samsung

Fairphone doesn't sell your data and has a genuinely ethical mission, but it runs retargeting ads, sends your full IP address to Bloomreach for segmentation, keeps contract data for a minimum of seven years, defaults to anonymisation rather than deletion when you ask for your data to be removed, and forum posts older than 60 days can never be fully deleted.

Samsung Australia collects an unusually wide sweep of data for a hardware company — IMEI numbers, MAC addresses, GPS location, voice commands sent to third-party servers, health metrics from Galaxy devices, contacts lists, browsing behaviour, and financial details. Data is shared with affiliates, business partners (including wireless carriers who can independently use it for promotions), and service providers, and is transferred to up to 16 countries including South Korea, China, and India. The policy acknowledges those countries may have weaker privacy protections than Australia, and users effectively waive the right to demand overseas recipients comply with Australian law just by using the services. Some controls are decent — a resettable Advertising ID, a 30-day access response window, and Samsung Pay that doesn't log transaction details — but retention periods are entirely vague, no security certifications are named, and there is no breach notification commitment.